After deposing the Hamas government, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abas meets with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt. King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak were also present at the meeting arranged to discuss Hamas' control of Gaza, 25 June 2007.

The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas' recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. "Starving, drying up and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary ... Reality has refuted the chorus of experts and commentators who preached [on] behalf of the boycott policy. This daft notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying pressure on a helpless population suffered a complete failure."

But has Levy got it wrong? The faces of Israeli and American politicians, including Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush, appear soot-free. On the contrary. Over the past fortnight they have been looking and sounding even more smug than usual.

I was set out to write about Father's day and the thousands of fatherless Iraqi children.The thousands of killed fathers, the thousands of fathers trying desperately hard to feed their families, daily putting their lives at great risk, in a country gripped by demonic violence. The exiled fathers, selling scraps in Amman and Damascus, bearing the brunt of daily insults. Or the unemployed fathers, feeling torn inside watching their kids go hungry. Or maybe the head bent down father, slouched posture, hiding scars beneath a worn out shirt. The father that has been imprisoned, humiliated, tortured and sodomized, unable to look his children in the eyes...

An example of the racist hate speech disseminated by the American Jewish Committee and carried as an advert in last week's NY Times. All in the interest of brainwashing the US public.

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be 'wiped off the face of the map.'

As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for 'this occupation regime over Jerusalem" to "vanish from the page of time.' Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed.

Electricity was restored to hundreds of thousands of New York City residents Wednesday afternoon after a series of outages in the Upper East Side and the Bronx, the Office of Emergency Management and Con Edison said.

At the peak of the outages, Con Edison said the blackout affected 136,700 customers in all, or more than 500,000 people. The OEM said 375,000 people were affected.

The cause was under investigation, but Con Ed spokesman Chris Olert said it was some sort of transmission disturbance. He didn't know whether the heat was a factor. "We won't even speculate on the cause yet," Olert said.

Virginia's Dulles Greenway toll road filed criminal charges earlier this month against an 85-year-old woman over $12.80 in tolls that she had already paid. Greenway officials claimed that Dorothy Neumann skipped out on payment for a total of four trips last September and that they intended to prosecute her to the fullest extent of the law. Neumann was charged with a class two misdemeanor, which carries a maximum $1000 fine, $200 in court fees and up to six months in jail.

A disabled single mother from Beaverton has filed a federal lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America, claiming that she is the victim of abusive legal tactics, threats and illegal spying as part of an overzealous campaign to crack down on music pirating.

The recording industry sued Tanya J. Andersen, 44, in 2005, accusing her of violating copyright laws by illegally downloading music onto her computer. Andersen claims in a suit she filed last week in U.S. District Court in Oregon that the recording industry refused to drop its case after its own expert supported her claims of innocence.

Firefighters battling the northernmost edge of the Angora fire ravaging the South Lake Tahoe area lost control of a back burn Tuesday afternoon, which jumped over Highway 89 and forced evacuations of several neighborhoods.

The skilfully choreographed end of the Tony Blair decade is about to receive an unwelcome gatecrasher as a centrepiece of one of London's most popular summer visitor attractions.
A huge and controversial artwork showing the prime minister and his wife, Cherie, being expelled naked from 10 Downing Street amid the chaos of Iraq will be unveiled at the Royal Academy on Wednesday.

Pope Benedict announced on Tuesday he had changed the rules to elect his successor, in a move meant to ensure that future pontiffs have broad support before white smoke rises again from the Sistine Chapel.

A Chinese city has banned its government buildings from turning on air conditioning until the temperature hits 33 degrees Celsius (91 Fahrenheit), state media reported. Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu province, is the latest city to set a limit on air conditioning use as pressure from the central government to save energy starts to take effect over fears of power failures this summer.

It's six-o'clock on Friday evening and a slow-moving wave of mostly white men and women aged 18 to 80 flows into the Maritime Labour Centre on Triumph Street for the three-day international 9/11 Truth Conference.

Abdul Rashid Ghazi, a senior cleric at Lal Masjid - the Red mosque - has called openly for jihad against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's met Osama bin Laden and says he agrees with the al Qaida leader's worldview.

He also says that many of the 10,000 Pakistani students enrolled in the fundamentalist religious schools known as madrassas affiliated with his mosque would give their lives to overthrow the U.S.-backed government of Pakistan and install Islamic rule.

A former acquaintance of a pig farmer accused of being Canada's most prolific serial killer told a court that she once found him in his slaughterhouse smeared in blood and next to a woman's body hanging from a chain.

Lynn Ellingsen said that Robert "Willie" Pickton, who is accused of murdering 26 women, pulled her inside and threatened that she would end up "right beside her" if she didn't keep quiet about what she had seen.

Ellingsen, a self-confessed crack cocaine addict, said she had recognised the dead woman as a prostitute whom she and Pickton had picked up earlier that night and brought back to his ramshackle farm outside Vancouver, British Columbia.

She said: "He was cutting something. There was blood everywhere. I just remember staring at her feet."

"My eye level is where her legs were. I saw red nail polish and this big shiny table."

The Nigerian government took a seven billion dollar (5.2 billion euro) negligence suit against the world's biggest pharmaceutical company Pfizer to court Tuesday, as the US giant demanded the charges be dismissed.

While United States officials accuse Iran of arming a resurgent Taliban, officials here say the weapons are actually part of vast caches left behind by the Soviet army that fought a nine-year war in Afghanistan before withdrawing in 1988.

US university students will not be able to work late at the campus, travel abroad, show interest in their colleagues' work, have friends outside the United States, engage in independent research, or make extra money without the prior consent of the authorities, according to a set of guidelines given to administrators by the FBI.

Federal agents are visiting some of the New England's top universities, including MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts, to warn university heads about the dangers of foreign spies and terrorists stealing sensitive academic research.

The FBI is visiting the nation's top technical universities in a bid to stop students taking their holidays outside the country.
MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts, have all had a visit from the spooks to warn them about the dangers of foreign spies and terrorists stealing sensitive academic research.

The FBI wants the universities to impose rules that will stop US university students from working late at the campus, travelling abroad, showing an interest in their colleagues' work, or have friends outside the United States, engaging in independent research, or making extra money without the prior consent of the authorities.

Romania has dismissed allegations that it was involved in hosting secret CIA jails to interrogate terror suspects in 2003-05, following claims made in an EU report.

Swiss MP Dick Marty claimed in an earlier report that the CIA ran secret jails in Poland and Romania after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. to interrogate foreign terrorist suspects.

Romania's Council of Europe envoy described the allegations as groundless, adding that his country has fully cooperated with the investigation and provided all information requested by Marty, who is heading the inquiry into alleged secret jails in Europe on behalf of the Council of Europe.

Bod Woodward gave a lecture at a local university a few months ago, that I attended with some like-minded friends. We were all very excited to see and hear Woodward discuss the lengthy interviewing process he went through in his research for his books and were hoping that he would give some new tidbits that would be newsworthy. The schedule was for him to discuss his book, "Plan of Attack." He has always had the status of a 'rock star' for me since 'Woodward and Bernstein' days, yet had seemed in recent years to have sold out to the establishment, until his most recent books.

Sanctions and diplomacy have failed and it may be too late for internal opposition to oust the Islamist regime, leaving only military intervention to stop Iran's drive to nuclear weapons, the US's former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday accused former President Clinton of not responding forcefully enough to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or later terrorist attacks.

Russia is ready to mediate in securing the release of Israeli military personnel abducted by Islamist guerillas if Tel Aviv requests it, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.

Three Israeli servicemen are being held by radical Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon-based Islamist movement Hizbollah, who are demanding the release of thousands of Arab terrorist suspects being held in Israeli prisons, in exchange for the hostages.

In opening remarks at a meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem, Lavrov said Russia was not party to talks on having the Israeli hostages freed, but it "is ready to send a serious political signal" to the abductors.

Earlier Wednesday, Lavrov met with the parents of Gilad Shalit, who was captured in June 2006 in a cross-border raid by Gaza-based Palestinian militants, and of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, kidnapped by Hizbollah loyalists the following month. They asked Russia to apply pressure on the abductors to free their sons.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow condemns any attempts to undermine Palestinian statehood, and called for a unified Palestinian state to be established as soon as possible.

A week of armed clashes between the two leading Palestinian factions, radical Islamic movement Hamas and pro-presidential Fatah, left at least 115 people dead and hundreds injured in Gaza and ended up with Hamas seizing control over Gaza. The West Bank, a more expansive territory, remains in the hands of Fatah.

"We support the efforts by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to bring order and restore the rule of law," Lavrov told a joint news conference with the Palestinian leader in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday killed 10 Palestinians, including a 12-year-old boy, Palestinians said, the bloodiest fighting in the area since the Hamas militant group violently seized control two weeks ago.

Comment: ...since the Hamas militant group violently seized control two weeks ago. As if this has anything to do with the fact that the Israeli army is killing innocent people!

More than a dozen gas stations were torched or damaged early Wednesday in Tehran by Iranians angered by fuel rationing measures that were suddenly imposed by the government, while many other Iranians lined up to fill their tanks.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is a hero on Wall Street; the same isn't true in Washington.

Sixteen months after succeeding Alan Greenspan, the chairman has managed to avert recession despite a housing collapse and keep inflation drifting lower in the face of $70 oil. At the same time, his relations with Congress are souring as lawmakers threaten to strip some of the Fed's authority to punish it for what they see as lax credit regulation.

The US trade deficit with the rest of the world leapfrogged in recent days. Aside from goods and services, the United States is now importing "consensus-based crisis management" from Japan.

Out of fear that a cleanup of bad loans would trigger widespread defaults, Japanese banks got themselves deeper and deeper into trouble by hushing up the problems. We are talking about the crisis at Bear Sterns' subprime hedge fund. The crisis shows that major adjustments on how the market prices risks are overdue; this may have negative implications for stocks, bonds, and commodities, as well as the US dollar.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips refused to sign deals Tuesday to keep pumping heavy oil under tougher terms in Venezuela's Orinoco River basin, signaling their departure from one of the world's largest oil deposits.

Torrential storms flooded parts of central Texas early Wednesday, stranding people on roofs, in trees and in vehicles, and the weather was so treacherous that some helicopter rescue attempts had to be abandoned.

Blistering hot weather caused the death of ten people in two days across Italy, as abnormal temperatures set in Tuesday, local media said Wednesday.

Media reported that elderly people suffering from heart problems were most affected by the unbearably hot weather, while about half a million residents at Apennines were left without electricity, disrupted due to the mass surge by consumers switching on fans and air conditioners.

A local resident of Sicilia said forests were on fire in the south of the country while temperatures over the last two days exceeded 42 °C (108 °F) in Palermo, and over 46 °C (115 °F) in Catania.

Johannesburg recorded its first confirmed snowfall for almost 26 years overnight as temperatures dropped below freezing in South Africa's largest city, grounding flights at its main airport.

The heaviest falls were over the southern suburb of The Hill, where four inches of snow fell, said Venetia Magane, a forecaster at the South African Weather Service in Pretoria. Temperatures in the city fell to minus 1 degree Celsius (30.2 degrees Fahrenheit) during the night, she added.

An island off the coast of Higashihiroshima is crumbling away due to countless crustaceans that have made holes in its rocks and caused its highest peak to completely disappear.

The rocky Hoboro Island has become a breeding ground for huge numbers of creatures known in Japanese as nanatsuba-kotsubumushi, a type of isopod. The surging number of insects has caught the attention of local researchers.

"It's rare, even on a global scale, to hear of biological erosion that has proceeded on such a large scale and at such a rapid pace as to alter the landscape of an island," said Yuji Okimura, an emeritus professor at Hiroshima University.

Heavy rainstorms along with lightning and hail since last week have hit many parts of China, killing nearly 50 people, destroying farmland and sweeping away houses.

On Monday afternoon, lightning killed five people building a tomb in Zhejiang. Altogether 48 people have died and 12 are missing after a week of heavy rains and thunderstorms that swept up the Yangtze River valley and across southern China.

Germany confirmed the H5N1 bird flu virus in three more wild birds in the southern state of Bavaria on Monday, bringing the total infected cases to six since last weekend.

Since three wild bird found dead in Nuremberg in northern Bavaria tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain on Sunday, three more cases have been confirmed, with five swans and one goose infected, the Friedrich Loeffler Institute, a veterinary institution, said on Monday.

An analysis released today critically examined a recent industry-sponsored study ruling out a link between autism and Rh immune globulin (RhIg) injections, some of which contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Besides extensive design flaws, the analysis uncovered manipulation of the study sample, so that earlier data revealing a positive autism-RhIg association was concealed.

Dog owners have long maintained that their pooches have a lot more going on between their furry ears than scientists acknowledge. Now, new research is adding to the growing evidence that man's best friend thinks a lot more than many humans have believed.

The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place.

Heat contained in the Earth's crust acts like a life-jacket, and without it much of North America would be under water, suggests research at the University of Utah.

The flooding predicted because of global warming is a much more immediate threat, the researchers note. It would take billions of years for North American rock to cool to the point where it will become denser and sink enough to put much of the continent under water.

The research suggests for the first time that about half the elevation of any place in North America is related to temperature differences within the Earth's crust, with most of the rest due to differences in what the rocks are made of.

In late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered.

Astronomers have been left to guess whether the object was an asteroid or a comet, and figuring out what it was would allow better modeling of potential future calamities.

Israeli researchers say they have genetically engineered tomatoes to give hints of lemon and rose aromas that have done well in testing on volunteers.

The transgenic tomato includes a gene from a variety of lemon basil, Ocimum basilicum, that produces an aroma-making enzyme called geraniol synthase, Efraim Lewinsohn of Newe Yaar Research Center and colleagues report.

Prince Charles, self-appointed champion of organic farming, has had his carrots rejected by Sainsbury's because they were found to be rotten.

The decision to turn down the vegetables, which Prince Charles sells under his Duchy Originals brand, emerged on the same day that figures revealed the Prince of Wales is investing more than ever in his organic farming and gardening enterprises.

Annual accounts published by Clarence House show the Prince received a record income of more than £14m in 2005-06 and that he spent 37 per cent more on his organic gardens - £41,000 in total.

But the business disagreement with Sainsbury's highlights a growing tension between organic farmers and supermarkets, which Prince Charles once accused of discriminating against "wibbly-wobbly" vegetables. Sainsbury's also rejected carrots supplied by the head of the Soil Association, Patrick Holden.

Landlord Bob Beech, right, at The Wellington Arms in Southampton with regular Edward Elder, an old sailing pal of the Island's king and a regular at the pub who knighted Sir Bob in a ceremony this month.

The Wellington Arms in Southampton is set to transform itself from a public house into the official embassy for a tiny Caribbean island.

Mossad insists Blair serves out his remaining contract or will dock his pension

Israeli sources have repudiated reports that the Bush Administration will employ UK Prime Monster as some sort of Middle East Mr Fix-it and insisted that when he steps down from his job as UK Prime Monster of June 27 he will return to Tel Aviv and his former Mossad desk job.

"Under the terms of his job contract Blair has to serve out the remaining five years left in Tel Aviv," a senior Israeli defense ministry source said today.

"Naturally we're disappointed that he didn't find the WMDs we planted for him around Iraq and his final pension will reflect this by way of bonus cuts.